Romanticism

By a strange twist of irony, opponents of Enlightenment like Rousseau and Wordsworth would rediscover in Nature what Neoplatonists had found in the God of revelation: the radiant presence of a transcendent moral order, of an Absolute ready to guide humanity to illumination (artists like Goethe and Turner became as obsessed with the study of light as they were with the study of clouds and mountains) and ultimate knowledge. ~ Page 411

Wordsworth’s belief that nature embodied a genuine transcendent moral law – in Plato’s terms, the God in Itself – came to him slowly beginning around 1793. naturally he didn’t come up with it entirely by himself. It had antecedents in various other poets and thinkers, especially in England. But Wordsworth was by far its most articulate spokesman, and by 1798 he had full-fledged creed to be communicated to others.

……. The idea that nature’s creatures, plants, and even its rivers and mountains embody an unselfishness, a wisdom and an intensity of life, shared with those human being who live closest to nature, may seem naïve. But not if we are members of Greenpeace – or followers of Plotinus. The Romantics’s fascination with nature led them to rediscover the Great Chain of Being and Plotinus’s World Soul with passionate excitement.

Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe!
Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought!
That givest to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion!.... (The Prelude, 1798)

The difference was that the Romantics saw the One of creation less as a rational hierarchy than as a powerful feeling of connectedness and serenity that at times seems entirely Zen. To quote William Blake:

To see the world in a grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Except the origin were not Zen at all, but the writing of Rousseau. Back in the early summer fo 1765, Rousseau had fled from his enemies, both imaginary and real, to a tiny house on an island on Lake Bienne in the Swiss Alps. There he had an experience so intense that it changed his life.

Sitting and listening to the rhythmic flux and reflux of the waves outside his window, he found he became completely at one with nature. As he described it later, all pain from the past and fears for the future faded away, leaving nothing except an intense awareness of nature’s permanence and of Being in Itself. “I realized,” he wrote in his description of the experience in ‘Reveries of the Solitary Walker, “that our existence is nothing but a succession of moments perceived through the senses.” In the solitude of nature, “my soul, exalted by these sublime contemplations, rose into the presence of the Divinity.” ~ Pages 412-413